The Virtual Design Team (VDT): A Multi-Agent Analysis Framework for Designing Project Organizations

Abstract

The Virtual Design Team (VDT) is a multi-agent modeling and simulation framework that has been developed over the past 15 years to help project managers design work processes and organizations for highly concurrent, "fast-track" project work. VDT has been extensively validated as an analysis tool for project organizations engaged in a routine -- albeit complex and fast-track -- product development efforts. Three important limitations of VDT are: (1) it models only routine projects for which all tasks, agents, and relationships between and among them can be pre-specified and held constant, (2) it assumes that all exceptions are handled hierarchically; and (3) it ignores any goal incongruency among project participants. This paper describes VDT, highlights its limitations, and presents ongoing research that is attempting to address these limitations.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 04, 2003
Accession Number
ADP021366

Entities

People

  • Mark E. Nissen
  • Raymond E. Levitt

Organizations

  • Stanford University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Agent-Based Simulations
  • Civil Engineering
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Community Of Practice
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering
  • Health Care
  • Information Processing
  • Information Systems
  • Multiagent Systems
  • Organization Theory
  • Organizational Structure
  • Product Development
  • Simulations
  • Social Psychology
  • Software Development
  • Teamwork

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Archaeological Resource Survey
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development